heliopausa

Mid-December, and Christmas is approaching rapidly - I've posted everything that needs to be posted - or I hope I have. Whether they get to the recipients by Christmas… well, I hope they do. Or the parcels, anyway, and most of the cards; the two cards I posted yesterday probably won't, but it's too late to fret about that. I plan to make a gingerbread house again, but have no other cooking plans at all (as yet); it'll be a quiet Christmas.

For Star Wars fans - the story of one fan of the old, un-Special Edition version, and his quest to save them from George Lucas's second thoughts.

It's a story that raises interesting questions. Of course artists have the right to redo earlier works (da Vinci made at least two attempts at painting Madonna of the Rocks, for example) or change them significantly (there are so many examples of authorial rewrites!) or even to attempt to obliterate them (Nathaniel Hawthorne tried hard to make his first novel disappear). Works can be revamped or withdrawn after publication, no question. But it does feel queasily unfair to digitally obliterate actors who were in the first version - or come to that, to remove from public access the work of the pre-CGI special effects artists.

The year's end is approaching, too - and I'm being forced to concede in reviewing the year's reading that I probably never will finish Capital in the Twenty-First Century. On the other hand, I did finally read the Silmarillion and Les Misérables, so that's something. What big book should I read next year, people? Classic or new, fiction or not - I was pondering something about Shostakovich and the siege of Leningrad, if I can find it in a bookshop before this year's end. Does that sound good?

Of course lots of NFE stories!  I'm a little more than half-way through read-and-reviewing, I think - of the main collection, anyway, and I'll post about that on the weekend, or just after.  And also of course I've been reading the last of the current bout of the infuriating genius Victor Hugo , who will get an entire post to himself next week sometime.  But also lots of other things, to wit:

- This story - true story report from the BBC - which seems like myth come to life - myth or ancient history: the woman who spins silk from the sea. 
"You have to be respectful to the place you live in. You are just passing by, these places are here to stay. And the sea has its own soul and you have to ask for permission to get a piece of it," she says. Her chant, which mixes ancient Sardinian dialect and Hebrew, echoes off the rocks.

- The Geography of Strabo, written a couple of millennia ago, which is a fascinating (but big) work, ( and as true, as reliable, as he could make it. )

- An article by Daniel Barrenboim (whom I admire very much) on Wagner, Israel and the Palestinians.

- An article considering the shifting significance of yoga in fiction - especially fiction outside India.  Orientalism to erasure?

- Caliban upon Setebos - I read this while in pursuit of some ideas raised by blueinkedpalm on LJ about exile.  And.... oh Robert Browning!  Are you being deliberately obscure?  (No, he's not.  He's an honest man, and that's just the way he talks.)  But I really did find it so convoluted that I had to put myself in a room by myself and read it all out loud to be sure I understood it all - and unexpectedly found myself asking:
"Why not make horny eyes no thorn could prick, Like an orc's armour?"      

Whaaaaa...?  "Like an orc's armour?"  Tolkien?  Is that you over there, cribbing ideas?

Speaking of whom, sally_maria  was recommending a LotR fanfic, which might be the next thing I launch into, when I finish the sumptuous banquet of the NFE.  Other recommendations (including for Old Major Lit) gladly accepted!

To amuse those of you who live where it really snows: the news story about snow falling in Hobart recently - even on the beach!  and some schools were closed, for a snow-day.  :) 

In delight that maybe only other Australians will follow: Bronwyn Bishop has resigned!  a blow against arrogance and corruption.  Just one blow - corruption is still around and corroding our political system, but still... this is good news.  It's also left our Prime Minister looking even more of a loose cannon - since he plainly didn't know how to handle the situation, at first making light of it, and then going to ground to avoid it. 
It wasn't giant corruption on a world scale - swanning around using taxpayers' money to bignote herself, and travel in luxury - but she's been riding for a fall with her blatant self-interest and partiality as Speaker, and I am very glad to see her go. 
There's other alarm bells in the story, too - why the Federal Police handed the matter over to the Department of Finance to investigate, and why the Department of Finance seem disposed to let her off the hook.  But for today, I'm glad she's gone as Speaker.

also in the category that this might only interest other Australians: I hope like mad that Adam Goodes returns next weekend and is met with sustained cheering.  I can't do a blinking thing about it, though, that I can think of.  Not all the opinions in the world (like this from the Age newspaper) can help unless the crowd themselves see themselves for what they are - racist and baying for blood.  Suggestions welcome.
(For non-Australians - Goode, a football player, has been booed incessantly whenever he takes the ground ever since he over-reacted badly to a young girl shouting abuse at him (she claims she didn't know it was racist, which I think is garbage, but irrelevant). The crowds have seized on this to boo him, allegedly because he was bullying to the girl, but... oh, come on!  They're not fooling anyone.)

Does this constitute a mass spoiler?  British academics come up with a formula to predict whodunnit in any Agatha Christie crime novel.

Great to see mangroves getting the attention they deserve!    They're the Puddleglums of the plant world - they don't look heroic, but they hang in there and achieve much, unsung.  (also: Sri Lanka has passed legislation preserving all of its remaining mangrove coasts.  Cheers!  \o/)

Les Miserables ground to a halt in last week's busyness, just as four young couples were spending a glorious holiday together around Paris -not just because of the busyness, but also because I could tell that this delicate happiness was not going to last - so I stopped to enjoy it before Hugo unleashes whatever mad dog/volcano/general depressing event he has planned.  The writing is amazing.  Here's one sentence about that idyllic holiday:
"That day was composed of dawn, from one end to the other."  

It's even more beautiful in French.  Not that I'm it reading in French! - just that that sentence was so stunning that I wanted to see how Hugo said it, which was:
"Cette journée-là était d'un bout à l'autre faite d'aurore."

I dreamed last night that I had agreed to write a story (not Narnia - SF, I think) and it was due in two days, and I was thinking, 'Oh yes, two days, I'd probably better start', and then thought 'Two days! Panic!' and woke myself up.  Which I suppose is just plain anticipation-anxiety for the NFE.  I finished writing a letter-to-the-writer, anyway.

But putting that aside for some inconsequential chat:

How about a dragon that switches from being male to being female?  Okay, it's the plain old ordinary lizard kind of dragon, and it changes very young, I think (I couldn't be absolutely certain from the article,apart from in the lab) but still it's "the first case of sex reversal seen in a terrestrial vertebrate in the wild".  So pretty impressive. :)

On the human-made side of things, I really like that the Forth Bridge has been named as a world heritage site.  I have a fondness for nineteenth-century bridges. No, maybe all bridges?  But the nineteenth-century engineering was something else again - just heroic!  Gritty, mathematical, groundbreaking in every single sense, and also playing mudpies/fort-building on a scale not seen since the pharaohs. 

In the world of reading, I've been rereading Kim, and debating with a couple of friends whether it is or isn't absolutely drenched in fairytale atmosphere.  (I'm on the yes side.  Opinions?  or opinions about Kipling himself, if you like.  He's a writer who breaks all the classifications, I think.)  
I've also been rereading, off and on, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, over at the NFFR site - where very interesting theories have emerged about Time and Winter, and much else.

In terms of future reading, a new Chalion-world novel - no, I see it's a novella - has emerged, with demon!  Well, there's an excerpt available for present reading, but in its entirety, it's future reading.  I hope it's good; I thought that The Hallowed Hunt was a bit over-reaching itself. (I was also narked by a character death which I just didn't want.)

Writing:  not at all.  :(

Reading:  Looking about for something undemanding, I picked up the no-magic-here fantasy Mistress Masham's Repose, by T H White, which, with its wildly Wicked Guardians harks  back to nineteenth-century satires of Gothic literature and also is in the line which later produced in The Hundred and One Dalmations, and Joan Aiken's Dido Twite (etc) books.  It's not exactly a "children's book" - it's more like one of those clever fairy-tales told to amuse sophisticated Louis XIV court circles, peppered with Bloomsbury/Cambridge-y injokes, very arch, mildly satirical, mildly upper-class liberal in tone - some good side-shots at colonialism and at bossy do-goodery.)  Overall - clever, well-written, nice central conceit.

It jarred, though, when White carried on with the suave, delicately humorous "we all know these things" tone when making reference to a seventeenth-century treason trial (with all that implies :( ).

Oh, for goodness' sake! How large is "too large", Dreamwidth?

This entry truncated, in mounting frustration with this shoddy  (DW) site.  The rest of it is on LJ.

( Why I didn't like the joke about the trial )

I've been online less this last week or so, but I haven't been entirely idle!  I dyed some Easter eggs with onion skins,but for some reason am having great difficulty getting the picture of them loaded.  Sorry about that, especially to pulchritude , who wanted to know how onion-dyed eggs worked.

To rest my eyes from this laptop screen, I took up my unfinished winter knitting -- a very silly tea-cosy, inspired by my having remnants of grey and pink wool to use up, and by these birds.  (There's still a thread trailing, because I need to take it to the destined teapot before I'll be certain how much gap to leave for the handle and spout).  I think I'll call it The Galah in Triumph.




I have many posts to catch upon, and I will today or tomorrow - and there's stories to read, too!  :)  Meanwhile, I've been  listening to an audiobook of The Three Mullah-Mulgars, about which more in another post, maybe.  Has anyone out there read it?

and despite reading less than usual, I have managed to accumulate some links:

Water...  sorely needed in these times some good news!  http://www.climatenewsnetwork.net/water-man-of-india-makes-rivers-flow-again

Language.... some very glum news, or news that must be glum for those involved in education in the UK, or for anyone who's tried to use Google translate.

and this last one which is about a fascinating but slowish way to furnish.

 

It's all rthstewart 's fault, said autumnia  (here), and indeed it is!  meaning, the ever-evolving three-sentence ficathon, place of wonders and many, many bypaths.  I'm not quite keeping up, but then I don't think anybody is keeping up totally.  I'm about to head out for the day, but I'll try to get to properly  reading through this evening.

I've posted fourteen fills, of which four are arguably Narnian, and two are distinctly Tolkien, and one is a crossover of the two, but I've also had great fun with older fictions of various sorts, and new fandoms that I don't really know, and in general have been feeling again the fun side of writing, and a sense of community at play.  :)  I'll post them on aO3 (and linkto this journal) when the weekend is done, and the reading/writing/posting slows down for the working week, before next weekend's probable new flurry of additions.  :D  

Meantime, thank you, Ruth, and everybody, for it all - not just the prompts and great ficlets, but also the way it leads to undiscovered books and tales, by way of prompts unknown - such as the book The Leaky Establishment, which I'd never heard of, and which sounds a must-read, and the Czech Cinderella version called Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella, which has set my mind off running after all the stories of women using nuts (mostly hazelnuts?) to solve dilemmas.  (Does anybody have any of these? - I know of another Cinderella-ish one, and Kate Crackernuts, but I'm sure I've read more... )  and the opening up of new fandoms of things I've read or seen, but never, never thought of writing in!  (Bertie Wooster!  terrifying Greek myth! pictures!!)



and on a quieter note, halfamoon has come to an end.  I don't feel I ever quite connected with what was going on, but I managed to post a single story, and then at the last minute posted as well a list of those stories from NFE 2014 which were specifically female-centric. 

First up: stay warm, all friends in snowy, snowy places!  :)

And ..things I've been reading, this past week

I am slogging on with My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk.  It's an interesting, but for me, distinctly not an easy read - I'm not sure how much this is because it's culturally a jump for me - it's sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire, in the lives and concerns of miniaturists, painting/illuminating those glorious manuscripts of tales.  So far - I'm just over halfway through - I haven't felt the utterly compelling sense of involvement in the lives of the characters which is one thing I enjoy in reading.  Maybe it's not what the writer is wanting to produce, though?  Lots of it is philosophical, thinking about art and artifice and theology - it's set as Islam begins to edge towards (if I'm reading correctly - much ignorance here) the strong anti-depiction theology of today.  And that sort of thinking-through of values and changes is also something I enjoy a lot in reading; and that part is starting to grip.

Thanks to the post three lines from three WIPs meme, I have found my way to a whole new story-cycle by cofax7  - it's a combination of two fandoms I don't know, taking the protagonists of Supernatural, and putting them in a world known as Riderverse from novels by  CJ Cherryh. Rivetting!

Other reading:  The Railway Navvies: a history of the men who made the railways, by Terry Coleman.  I enjoyed this very much as a connector, linking the construction of railways in Britain with many things, like parallel European works and the Crimean War.  For example, it was the brilliant intervention of the railway baron,Morton Peto, who more or less pulled the British army from total disaster in the Crimea,by getting built (at cost) a railway to get supplies through;  Army officers were astonished at the speed, skill and cohesion of the workforce (all volunteers -paid,but not drafted).  It's popular history, not academic history, and won't be much new to any historian out there, but they're not in the general memory - or at least, they weren't in mine!  It's not terrific in terms of reliability - he is a little bit fast-and-loose with his sources - e.g. one source which he quotes as being about pipe-smoking among the navvies turns out on investigation to be about pipe-smoking among the women in the navvy community (not labourers - family).  But I thought it was great as a thought-provoker and for lots of sidelights on social history.  :)

also, come across by chance on the internet: an interesting paper called "Omitted from History: Women in the Building Trades" by Linda Clarke and Chris Wall, which gives details of legislation and actual figures of women involved in these trades in England over several centuries. Some of their sources are secondary, e.g. they bring from someone called Snell, the info that "in the southern counties of England between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries... 34% of parish apprentices were girls, who were apprenticed in 51 occupations including as bricklayers, carpenters, joiners and shipwrights".  But some are primary, such as the London 1841 Census figures.  All of which I found very interesting, though I have no particular use for it.  :)

editing to add:  And I made another ghastly bish-up trying to to get the neat link to cofax7 .  :(   Thanks to lady_songsmith  for bailing me out!

So, this helps explain why my internet access has been running so slow all week.  (Though the clip of the shark gnawing a cable is just  from the files, not this week's actual damage being done.)   I've been running slow myself, and the two of us combined - me and the internet - have made the week a wonder of non-productivity.

On the other hand, I did manage some reading - more Vorkosigan, and more George MacDonald (Phantastes, which I didn't think highly of) and the beginning of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which wasn't what I was expecting at all. I thought it would be shortish and made up of disconnected stories involving transformations of people into laurel trees, or deer, mostly as a result of sexual entanglements with the gods.  But it turns out to be (so far) a long (fifteen books!) history of the whole mythological world, beginning with
( the creation )
(which was fascinating enough in itself - why did Ovid think the world had two poles, north and south?) 
and ending, I gather, though it's fourteen books away, with Aeneas and the founding of Rome.

Two shorter stories from the internet, though.  One rather moving story - of the respect paid by a Japanese family, over 140 years, to the burial place of a total stranger. 

And one account of an amulet from the sixth century, showing how religions and myths cross over and shift and emerge in new forms, to the tsk-tsk of those expert in classical forms, who are certain that the artist simply Got It Wrong.

Life has been very full-on lately, and I have a rotten cold, moan, moan, and I haven't done much reading.  But I've finished Lilith, anyway.     
( Lengthy thoughts on Lilith, with spoilers. ) 


And have also been considering various aspects of Narnia with transposable_element, on a 2013 DW thread here.The talk was getting rather squashed up, so I relocated the discussion here, on the very , very quiet NFFR_Forum board.  Currently - did Lewis make Peter too good?  All discussers welcome!